Manually triggering Keep Connection Alive

We're using photon version 4-0-29-11263. The problem we're having is that people sometimes get timeout disconnects, usually after a server hickup. This has been happening more and more often as we've moved from reliable to unreliable messages, for a better feeling and lag resistance.

We're reasoning that photon uses reliable messages to check if the connection is alive, and the fewer reliable messages that are sent, the more photon relies on it's default keep alive message, which should happen every 1.5 sec if I'm not mistaken. This is backed up by what people say is happening, where they get a spike, then gameplay returns to normal and udp messages gets sent and received as normal for a couple of seconds , and then they get a timeout disconnects.

My question is if there's a way of manually telling the game that a peer connection is alive when a udp message is received?